Closing the achievement gap between black and white
students has been one of our nation’s overarching goals for half a century. We
are failing miserably.

As researchers know all too well, there is still a gulf
of more than 200 points between the SAT scores of white and black students, and
black children trail their white peers by significant margins on every subject
tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Many people are likewise aware that Michigan performs
even worse in this regard. Across grades and subjects, Michigan’s racial
achievement gap on the NAEP is four to nine points larger than the gap
nationwide.[1]

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But there is one aspect of the achievement gap that is
almost universally unknown: how it differs between public and private
schools.

To document this disparity, I used a U.S. Department of
Education database to compute the average NAEP test score differences between
black and white students in both public and private schools. The results appear
in Table 1.

As the table shows, there is a sizeable achievement gap
between black and white fourth-graders in both public and private schools. It is
also clear that the private-sector racial achievement gap is narrower at the
12th grade than at the 4th grade in all of the core NAEP subjects. Public
schools actually see a larger race gap in both writing and mathematics at
the 12th grade than at the fourth.

Averaged across subjects, the public school racial
achievement gap is virtually unchanged between fourth and 12th grades. By
contrast, the gap in private schools is an average of 27.5 percentage points
smaller at the 12th grade than at the fourth.

Note that the achievement gap does not close faster in
private schools because white private school students lose ground with respect
to white public school students as they move to higher grades. Rather, the gap
closes because black private school students have learned at a substantially
higher rate than black public school students.[3]

Still, the comparison in the table above is
arguably unfair — to the private schools.

To see why, consider the research on dropout rates. For
instance, economist Derek Neal has found that black students attending urban
private schools are far more likely to complete high school, gain admission to
college and complete college than similar students in urban public schools.[4]
In a study comparing Milwaukee public school graduation rates with those of
low-income participants in the city’s private-school voucher program, Manhattan
Institute senior fellow Jay Greene found that the voucher students were
more than one-and-a-half-times as likely to graduate as the public school
students. More remarkable still, Greene found this to be true even when he
compared the voucher students to those attending Milwaukee’s elite group of
academically selective public schools.

This higher graduation rate in private schools is not
only a boon in itself; it casts the private-sector gap reductions in an even
more favorable light. Dropouts tend to be poor performers academically, so when
they leave the test-taking population, the average of the remaining students
usually goes up. This dynamic should generally improve the test scores of
public high school seniors, yet public schools have a worse impact on the
test score gap.

So, will the
NAACP and other groups avowedly committed to reducing the racial achievement
gap act on these findings? Will they compete with one another to discover the
best way of bringing nongovernment schooling within reach of all children?

The answer, obviously, is no.

Why?

Because while these groups are committed, on some level,
to the aims they profess, they are handcuffed by a self-destructive political
ideology. Yes, they will say, we should do everything we can to close the
racial achievement gap, as long as our efforts stay comfortably within the
confines of a state-run education monopoly.

Given the choice between actually narrowing the racial
achievement gap and remaining ideologically pure, they will chose ideological
purity.

Sooner or later, this position must surely crumble under
the weight of its own immorality.

#####

Andrew J. Coulson is senior fellow in education policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center are properly cited.

[2]
The ideal comparison of this sort would be to follow a single group of black
and white students through the grades, noting their achievement gap each
time they were tested. That is unfortunately not possible using NAEP data
because the sample of students to whom the test is administered differs from
one year to the next. In the absence of that ideal data series, I have opted
to examine scores across grades in a single year (whichever year happens to
be the most recent for which both fourth- and 12th-grade results are
available for the given subject).

[3]
Some might suggest that blacks who attend private schools are somehow
inherently "better students" than blacks who attend public schools, and that
this is why the racial gap decreases more quickly in private schools. This
hypothesis isn’t promising, however.

It’s true that black students who attend private schools score higher on the
NAEP at both the fourth- and 12th-grade levels than black students who
attend public schools. But whatever inherent advantages black private school
students may have over black public school students (such as stronger
families), white private school students usually have in comparison to white
public school students. In fact, white students, like black students, score
higher in private schools than in public schools at both grade levels. Thus,
even if black students in private schools are starting from a higher base,
they are also forced to reach a higher standard when they try to make gains
against their white classmates.